Yahoo India Launches Local Search With Getit

Yahoo India has finally launched its co-branded local search portal, yahoo.getit.in, partnering with the Delhi based classifieds business, Getit Infoservices. This is the same portal that Medianama had reported in September 2012.

While the deal period or the financial details of the partnership were not disclosed, Getit claimed to offer its entire database of over 3 million business listings to Yahoo users through this partnership.

How this works?

When we checked, we noticed that the Yahoo India homepage currently features a new ‘Local’ section, allowing users to search for local services and business information around their current location.

What’s worth noting here is that Yahoo offers these search results on the co-branded portal rather than on its own portal. In addition to this, Getit also stated that Yahoo will offer relevant local listings in its regular web search results corresponding to a local need, however we weren’t able to locate any such local listings at the time of writing this article.

Only Cosmetic Changes? We also noticed that the co-branded local search portal continues to be an exact replica of Getit.in in both looks and functionality, besides a few cosmetic changes and Yahoo branding in the logo. Even the search results were strikingly similar on both the portals at the time of writing this article, indicating that Yahoo has probably outsourced all its local search initiatives to Getit.

If true, this will be a significant addition to Getit’s existing clientele which already includes NDTV, Bhaskar, India Today, Aircel, Loop Mobile among others.

From Yahoo’s perspective, the company will be benefiting from the improved city presence, as compared to its previous local search product in.local.yahoo.com, which was powered by the voice based directory search service CallEzee and was shut down in June 2012. CallEzee claims to have presence in 17 Indian cities, while Getit claims to have presence in more than 30 Indian cities.

Previous Getit Developments: Last month, Getit had partnered with Research In Motion (RIM) to market its BlackBerry enterprise solutions including its enterprise mobility solutions like BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) Express to small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) in Bangalore and Delhi, followed by other cities in 2013.

Getit had also inked a similar tie-up with Google, following which Getit was appointed as Google India’s SME partner, responsible for marketing Google’s digital advertising solution Google Adwords to small and medium sized businesses, as well as develop, launch and manage digital campaigns for these businesses. Getit had claimed that it will be marketing these solutions pan-India with its on-ground team of more than 1,000 people across the country.

Speaking with MediaNama, Sidharth Gupta, CEO, Getit Infoservices had claimed that the company was signing up around 1.2 million SMEs for listing every year and had stated that Getit would be bundling its own products with AdWords through this initiative.